Fourth, the current state of the field makes it difficult to make suggestions
to educators, particularly to classroom teachers. As we are yet unsure exactly
how moods and emotions relate to cognitive processing in a broad variety of
tasks, it is difficult to make recommendations for educators regarding the
types of affect that may be beneficial for processing. Furthermore, even if we
do determine that certain types of affect are more beneficial for certain types
of tasks, we must seriously question whether we would want teachers to in-
duce negative affect before students began working on a task requiring detail-
oriented processing. Rather, when applying this research to school settings,
we may want to focus more on the instances in which positive affect is partic-
ularly beneficial and encourage educators to focus on fostering positive affect
in those contexts. In addition, in instances were negative affect is beneficial,
we may instead want to encourage teachers to work with their students in reg-
ulating their affect, so that they are not overwhelmed by positive affect. That
is, rather than attempting to enhance negative affect, students might be en-
couraged to diminish their positive affect. Obviously this research raises some
difficult questions when applying it directly to educational settings. However,
more information is needed about the basic processes involved in linking af-
fect to cognitive processing before we make any specific recommendations to
teachers.
Finally, in terms of future research, much work needs to be done in apply-
ing these social psychological theories to education. As is apparent from our
review, there are very few empirical studies that directly examine how affect
influences cognitive processing in academic contexts. Therefore, we urge
other researchers to consider how mood and emotions relate to cognitive
processing on a variety of educational tasks. In doing so, it may be important
to first conduct research on simple academic tasks that can be clearly classi-
fied as involving heuristic versus detailed processing. Then, we need to con-
sider larger, more complex tasks to gain a better understanding of how affect
influences tasks that require both types of processing. In addition to the type
of task, it is also important to consider how the duration of the task and the
focus on current affect versus affect over the course of a section or unit differ-
entially influence students’ learning. While this research is in its infancy and
will require much work to refine these models, the integration of affect into
our models of cognitive processing should help us develop a more compre-
hensive and accurate picture of student learning in academic settings. Once
this integration is better understood based on empirical evidence, we suggest
that future research tackle the complex issue of integrating affect, cognitive
processing, and motivation into one model for learning in school. The inte-
gration and expansion of these models not only will better reflect the reality
of student learning, but also may have important implications for the im-
provement of instruction.
84 LINNENBRINK AND PINTRICH